Age of the 'gayby' arrives in South Florida, finally

Joel Batten and his husband Henry Amador take a walk with their one-year-old… (Susan Stocker, Sun Sentinel )

October 26, 2012|By Nicole Brochu, Staff writer

Couples pushing strollers. Play dates at the park. Daddy get-togethers for Sunday brunch.

South Florida's gay community has taken on a distinctly family-oriented feel these days —two years after a landmark state appeals court ruling threw out Florida's 33-year-old ban on gay adoption. And rushing in to offer resources and support is a growing crop of parenting blogs, family-fun events and grow-your-family seminars.

Welcome to the age of the "gayby," South Florida.

It's an age of discovery for new dads like Fort Lauderdale hairstylist Henry Amador. In January, he started DADsquared, a blog, Facebook page andTwitter site for gay fathers. He's watched his blog readership grow to more than 700 since — a testament, he says, to the hunger for gay parenting content.

"I was looking for gay parent resources and, quite frankly, couldn't find much after [the blog's] conception, so many families like ours started to reach out," said Amador, who adopted infant son, Ben, with his husband in October 2011. "It's been remarkable."

And it's been a learning experience even for the Pride Center in Wilton Manors. Though it's among the LGBT community's top resources for services and information, center officials discovered they had offered little on gay families.

"It was brought to our attention that there was a whole segment of our community we weren't reaching," said Robert Boo, the center's executive director.

So earlier this year, it launched a five-part series of panel-led discussions on "Growing My Family," exploring the laws, challenges and opportunities surrounding domestic and international adoption, foster parenting and surrogacy.

Another South Florida LGBT service organization, SunServe, is expanding its outreach, too. This year, its annual Valuing Our Families conference of roundtable discussions is being held in collaboration with the Sheriff's Community Day at The Pride Center.

The event, this Saturday, is an opportunity to meet the "larger need in the community for LGBT family resources," said Katharine Campbell, SunServe's director of clinical services.

These community events and forums come at a time when the look and feel of the LGBT community has visibly changed.

Children and strollers are now more commonplace at gay and lesbian Pride Fest parades in Lake Worth and Wilton Manors. Gay dads and lesbian moms are meeting for Sunday brunch and after-school play dates. Weekend barbecues, like those hosted throughout Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties by the nonprofit South Florida Family Pride, are more popular than ever.

"These kids are growing up with each other," said Richard Alalouf, director of South Florida Family Pride, which has 250 member families and counting. "It's a way for kids to know they're normal."

The kids are increasingly getting the message.

"More young gay people I talk to are having families because they see it's possible," said Donald Cavanaugh of Lake Worth, a consultant and workshop facilitator on LGBT issues. "We have a generation visibly having families."

The transformation of the community's make-up, experts say, is rooted as much in emotion as legal freedoms.

"You're living in this climate where you've been told you were unfit to be a parent," Miami adoption attorney Elizabeth Schwartz said of the Florida LGBT community's pre-ruling mindset. "My LGBT work has gone from a stream to a torrent since the law changed. You've got 33 years of pent-up demand.

"It's like this huge black cloud that's been lifted. They never thought they'd see this day."

Of course, some same-sex couples weren't willing to wait. As Florida continued its reign as one of the last states to prohibit gays from adopting, a number of South Floridians got around the ban by denying their sexuality, adopting in other states, or pursuing the costlier option of surrogacy or IVF.

But those cases were more the exception than the norm, experts say, so much so that strollers not long ago were more often associated with dogs than babies in LGBT neighborhoods.

"About a year ago, when we went for a walk in Wilton Manors with our baby carriage, people would think it was a puppy," said Amador, owner of Salon Mantra in Fort Lauderdale. "And it really upset me, because we had worked too hard to get here for people to think it was just a Shih Tzu."

Amador and husband, Joel Batten, were part of the first openly gay and lesbian group in South Florida to go through state-mandated, pre-adoption parenting classes.

Though the couple had fostered children and were exploring ways to grow their family before the 2010 ruling, "it kind of seemed out of our reach," Amador said. "Florida is a tough state."

But with the lifting of the ban, he said, "all of the sudden, the door opened."